Animal cruelty bill attacked by lobby groups

FOR FIVE months, a coalition of powerful lobby groups has been waging a guerrilla war against the federal government's new animal cruelty bill. It now appears that they have Ottawa on the run.

As The Star's Valerie Lawton reported last week, Justice Minister Anne McLellan is contemplating an amendment to exempt farmers, hunters and animal researchers from the bill.

The exemption might be in the form of a preamble that exempts so-called accepted farm, hunting and animal husbandry practices from the ambit of any animal cruelty law.

Shelagh MacDonald, program director for the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, points out that this would have the perverse effect of making the new law weaker than the one it is designed to replace.

When, after months of delay, McLellan finally unveiled her bill last December, most Canadians probably thought it was high time.

Several high-profile cases of animal abuse had taken place that year - including one where a year-old Rottweiler was dragged on a chain behind a pickup truck until his paws were worn and bloodied.

These cases highlighted the problems in current animal cruelty laws. Animals are treated as property rather than living beings. Penalties for even the most brutal attacks are light (the maximum is a $2,000 fine and six months in jail but the maximum is rarely applied). There is little money for enforcement.

As well, McLellan explicitly linked animal abuse to rape and child abuse when she introduced Bill C-17. Citing U.S. studies, she pointed out that those who torture animals are more likely to do the same to humans.

On the face of it, Bill C-17 seemed a done deal. What could be more uncontroversial than a be-nice-to-animals bill?

Yet the very fact that the government felt compelled to play the child abuse card highlighted the political problems surrounding C-17. Animals are big business. Farming, for example, is no longer a simple industry. Modern factory farms involve thousands of animals, kept indoors in cages and processed from birth to death with eerie efficiency.

Some of these factory farms keep their animals in patently inhumane conditions. Chickens, for instance, often have their beaks and claws removed so they don't rip each other apart in their overcrowded cages. Calves may be confined from birth in small boxes to ensure that their veal is white and tender. Hogs may be kept in tiny barred cages situated over noxious open manure pits to simplify cleaning.

Yet all of these practices are deemed "acceptable'' rather than cruel. Factory farmers argue that they need to do this to compete globally.

Bill C-17 did not address any of this. Nor did it address the forms of quite legal and often gratuitous research used against animals in the name of science. (One particularly bizarre form - pain research - involves torturing animals without anesthetic to see how much they can endure).

But the farming and research lobbies worried that C-17 might be the thin edge of the wedge. The bill contains an important principle - the idea that animals are not simply property, that humans don't necessarily have the right to do whatever they want to other beings.

At the same time, the hunting lobby, in the form of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, got involved. Bill C-17 had virtually nothing to do with hunting. But the bill's backers included animal rights groups such as the Toronto-based Animal Alliance, groups the hunting federation sees as its arch enemies.

If animal rights groups supported the bill, then the hunting federation was opposed. It was that simple. The federation hired lawyer Peter Danson and came up with the curious argument that Bill C-17 would make it illegal for fishermen to impale worms on hooks.

Throw in the always prickly Canadian Jewish Congress, which worried that Bill C-17 might interfere with Jewish ritual slaughter methods (it won't) and a motherhood issue had become a political minefield.

MacDonald of the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies argues that none of these concerns is valid. Provincial humane society officers almost never investigate hunters now. ("I can't think of a case,'' says MacDonald.) Nor, she says, will they do so in the future. "We just don't have the resources.''

As for the worm-on-the-hook argument, she dismisses this as untrue and alarmist. "They call animal welfare and animal rights people radicals,'' she says. "Quite frankly, I think it's the other side.''

Even most factory farming, she says, is outside the scope of the bill. "We're concerned about the case where a farmer isn't feeding his animals,'' she says, "or isn't caring for an injured animal. Those are the kinds of things we're talking about..."

"We don't think it makes sense to exempt farmers, or anyone, from the Criminal Code.''

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